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Dealing with Insufficient Detail in Work Requests

Kenneth Fisher airs some grievances:

Many years ago I was given a work request that literally just said:

It’s broke. Fix it.

I’m sure you can see how that is supremely unhelpful. And this isn’t the only time I’ve gotten such great requests.

Kenneth has some great advice here when framing requests and I have just one more thing to add: err on the side of using nouns over pronouns, even when it feels repetitive. “I was in the XYZ service and when I clicked the button, it stopped working” is a mess of an error report because it could refer to the service, to the button, or to some third thing which you have in mind but never wrote down.